Tell Her
by KRSONMar
Summary: "The reason Gordon was lying on his bed in his room at White Forest, curled up into himself, and with his eyes streaming water, was because he had been punched in the stomach. The emotional impact of the punch had only been slightly increased by the fact that it had been Alyx who had thrown it."


**A/N-** **Before I say anything else, THIS IS NOT THE SEQUEL TO CABIN IN THE WOODS, this is something else.**

 **So yeah, that's bullet-point number 1.**

 **Bullet-point number 2 is: I am not dead! I say that because several people have PMed me or left me reviews asking whether I am, and to those people, you are lovely human beings and I am flattered and very much alive!**

 **3\. I have not exactly fallen out of the fandom or at least I never intended to. The fanfiction muse is a thing, and it dries up sometimes. That happened until about a year ago, but then Major Life Changes started happening (new job, moving across the state for said new job, said job being very demanding, losing said job, moving back across state, unemployment, crappy, very demanding retail job, new, better, real job, moving across the country for said new job, about to move into apartment in new part of the country, et cetera, et cetera...), and they aren't quite resolved yet, so it will still be some time before I am able to focus on getting that sequel to you. Sorry about that. (Seriously, I'm really sorry.)**

 **4\. "But what were you doing when you said you were working on the sequel?" Ah, clever fanfiction reader, I see you've been following along at home! For NaNoWriMo 2014, I tried to write it, and ended up going in a different direction than I meant to and then writing myself into a corner with it so that he only way to get out of that wrong-turn corner was to back out and delete several PAGES of work, which, when you're doing NaNoWriMo, is catastrophic. I got more caught up in keeping up with NaNoWriMo than in getting the fic written so that this caused me to crumble under a perhaps-faulty definition of failure BUT! Instead of just giving up completely, I worked on another plot-bunny I had instead, and that is what you're looking at right now.**

 **Which brings me back to THIS fic. It is not Cabin in the Woods 2 (I've adopted that as a working title from one of the people who has been helpfully reminding me to write, but the actual title when it is done will be different), and it is not my very, very best work, I feel, and it is fluffy, so if you don't like fluff, it won't be your bag, but I offer it up as proof that a.) I am alive, b.) I am still working on fanfic and don't intend to abandon the fandom or my fanfic-writing, and c.) I am not really all that horrible for being a schlubby, lazy writer and you shouldn't think horrible things about me because...because. Please?**

 **There's my overly-long Author's Note for this fic (I know you guys loooooove these long Author's Notes!), so, with thanks especially to RRS-15 and everyone else who has checked in to see if I'm still alive, here ya go for now:  
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The reason Gordon was lying on his bed in his room at White Forest, curled up into himself, and with his eyes streaming water, was because he had been punched in the stomach. There was always an emotional reaction when one experienced pain, that was just the way the human body worked, it was part of the fight-or-flight response; the emotional impact of the punch had only been slightly increased by the fact that it had been Alyx who had thrown it. It hurt physically, and that was the reason he was gasping and coughing for breath, his eyes and nose running, and not, he maintained to himself, anything to do with rejection.

Gordon replayed the scenario for the umpteenth time in his mind: the hurt in Alyx's eyes, the fury behind the swing of her arm, the slight gasping sound she'd made as she'd stormed off and left him there, doubled over and gasping for air. He had done something wrong, that much was very obvious, but he was struggling to figure out exactly what. Was it the message he had been trying to convey, or the mode of communicating it? He thought it was sure to be the latter-although was that because he was terrified of what it meant if it had been that what he was trying to say had been unwelcome?

This had all started last night, when he'd finally made The Decision. It was a decision, he felt, that could change his life, give it new meaning, maybe even create something for once instead of destroying something—because while he knew Wallace Breen's taunt at him on the telescreen in the Citadel had been utterly ridiculous and meant to get inside his head, even when we know that someone has it in for us or that they're grasping for straws, if one has been wracked with self-doubt, they tend to develop emotional raw spots, and stick and stones thrown in desperation can turn into festering splinters.

It had taken another harrowing close encounter with death—this time on his own part, not Alyx's, thankfully—and then a glimpse of what he was missing out on, and might have lost a shot at for good, for him to make The Decision, but he had finally made it, as scary and humbling as the decision-making process itself had been: he was going to tell Alyx he loved her.

Now that he had made The Decision, though, he had to figure out how to execute it. He lay in bed that night thinking of grand gestures he'd seen or heard of in his life before the Combine; most of them could no longer be done, like renting space on a billboard to paint it with a big declaration of affection, or the numerous schemes he'd seen in movies about high schoolers chasing after their crushes and putting on some big to-do on the night of the prom. Even the less dramatic, more realistic gestures he was thinking of were unlikely options: he was no good at writing heart-felt letters, and he had been a ramen-noodles-for-dinner-leftover-pizza-for-breakfast kind of man prior to the Black Mesa Incident, so cooking her a meal to eat by candlelight or baking a cake with his "I love you" written in icing wasn't plausible either.

Then inspiration hit him: he could give her a song to play, and let the song do the talking! Sure, it was a tactic right out of the middle school romance playbook...but there was a reason for that, and it gave him a good way to be creative and really expressive of his feelings for her. He fell asleep trying to think of songs that would be appropriate, and the next morning, eating breakfast in the mess hall, had still been working on it when Barney sat down next to him. After Gordon had responded to Barney's attempts at conversation with "Huh?" for a third time, Barney had finally commented on his distraction.

"Hey space cadet, Xen's crappy this time of year, so why dontcha come back down to Earth?"

"S-Sorry," Gordon had blushed into the bowl of porridge-like mush the mess hall served in the morning.

"What's eatin' ya?" Barney inquired through a mouthful of food.

"Um..." Gordon responded eloquently. Barney was not impressed.

As Gordon moved his hands in an attempting-to-speak gesture to get the words flowing, Barney quipped dryly, "Uh-oh, it's something heavy, isn't it? Let me guess: the sun is about to explode and we have to evacuate Earth? Doctor Breen has a twin? The...the prophecy of The One Free Man dictates that thou shalt needest the humble folk to venture forth on a quest to find the heart of an antlion, the uvula of a headcrab, and a herring to prepare a doomsday potion which shall herald the downfall of those cyborg-y ones, they that blow everything up?"

Gordon glared at him.

"Sorry, I had too much fun with that, didn't I? I was on a roll there. I should've been an author, that's what I should've done, write thriller mysteries or some..."

"I was thinking about something a little more...mundane, Barney," Gordon grumped.

Barney scratched his chin thoughtfully, evidently into this guessing-game thing.

"Well, you're the last person I know who has a right to be struggling to find a purpose, so existential crises are out. You _used_ to spend way too much time making up reasons you might get fired from Black Mesa, even though they just thought you were the keenest li'l camper there, and it's even more improbable now that anyone's going to fire you from blowing-things-up duty. Money no longer exists, blessed hallelujah, and politics are very pre-extra-terrestrial invasion, so there goes half of the usual cause for angst that has plagued humanity lo these millenia of civilization. Leaves only one thing."

Barney leaned in and Gordon held his breath involuntarily.

"You got crabs? Everybody's got those now, there's no shame in it anymore, there's tons of ways to get rid of 'em...the head-humping kind, on the other hand..."

"You are so crass, Barney."

"And yet, that's why you people all keep me around. Clearly you enjoy it," he said sagely, gesturing with his spoon before digging back into the mush in his bowl. "Kinda says more about everyone else than about me, though, dontcha think?"

Gordon sighed the long-suffering sigh that he had perfected during the time he had known Barney.

"Uh-oh," Barney adopted a stern tone and look, "am I not being serious enough for _Doctor Freeman_ , the _savior_ of _humanity_?" Gordon's squirm of discomfort was just what Barney wanted and the elder of the two Resistance fighters took it as encouragement to continue. He wailed dramatically, gesticulating grandly as if he were on stage, "Ohhhhhh woe is me, for I have so much weight upon these shoulders! Won't some clever jester come along to lighten my burden?! Yet nay, for I shall scorn his attempts with much sighing and insistence of maturity imposed!"

"That's not Shakespeare and your accent totally ruins it. Do they even read Shakespeare in Alabama?"

"Yet lo, with these feeble attempts do I mock my would-be companion, my sole refuge from the doom and gloom of this world that verily, I do _crave_! Yea, gentles, 'tis not for me to deny myself of denying myself...verily, I do deny myself all the time! Misery be my glory, and sadness be my joy!"

A group of rebels at a table across the room were watching with rapt attention, clearly enjoying the impromptu entertainment. Gordon couldn't tell if Barney was playing to them or completely consumed in making fools of them both to the point of not even noticing that he had an audience, but he could feel his own ears turning red.

"Tempt not forth my smiles with winsome prose and talented speeches, nor with good looks that get so much more play than I do, for verily, I am but a four-eyed nerd—"

"Wow...you really should write, Barney, that's something right there. I don't know what, but something. Try it in iambic pentameter."

The rebels across the way leaned in excitedly, as if actually eager to see Barney maintain the performance in metered verse—maybe they'd really gone that long without any culture at the base, or maybe this particular group of people had been drama geeks or Lit students, neither of which Gordon had ever understood anyway—and Barney quickly switched gears.

Grabbing a pair of juice glasses and imitating the effect of buck teeth by hanging his upper teeth over his lower lip, he mimicked standing very stiffly.

"Mneeeeeh, I'm Gordon and everything is very serious and depressing. Oh the responsibility!"

Barney was now adopting a mocking voice that sounded nothing at all like Gordon, and more like Steve Urkel from Family Matters. The rebels across the way burst into delighted laughter at the sudden change in Barney's tactic. Gordon sighed.

"Stop embarrassing me, guys, I'm trying to save humanity!" Barney slurred in his faux-imbecile voice, adopting a ridiculously over-serious expression and staring at Gordon head-on through the juice glasses. Gordon didn't mean to, but found himself snorting in involuntary laughter at the ridiculous line. Barney, his face betraying no hint of facetiousness, pursed his mouth and pointed his finger at Gordon in an "I gotcha" gesture. Now that Gordon was laughing in spite of himself, Barney folded his hands in front of him and intoned with false seriousness in a fake Sigmund Freud accent, "Now, Doctor Freeman, tell me about your troubles."

Gordon, recovering from his laughter, gasped, "How do you do that?!"

Barney grinned proudly, stirring his coffee, and would only reply, "Ain't it funny how at Black Mesa, you were this mature-beyond-his-years genius-boy, and I was the guy who was a few years younger than you tryin' to bring you down to my level...but now I'm getting dangerously close to old-fart territory, and you're still bizarrely pre-pubescent, and yet you're _still_ an old man at heart, and I'm still—"

"Somehow, against all odds and logic, improbably juvenile?"

"You know what they say," Barney responded with overplayed sagacity, pointing his spoon at Gordon for emphasis, "'you're only young once, but you can be immature forever.' I like to think it keeps me young."

He punctuated this with a boyish wink. Gordon shrugged and replied, "See, that seems to work well for you, but I just drink the blood of sacrificial virgins. That's my secret."

"I hear it does wonders for the skin," Barney answered with pitch-perfect dryness.

"Now, seriously, though," he went on, turning his gaze to drawing on the table with the residual liquid left over from the ring his coffee mug had left, "what has Your Vampiric Lord of Darkness down-and-out?"

"Oh, um..." Barney was always very good at his trademark techniques for lifting Gordon out of a bad mood, so much so that now Gordon had to remember what he'd been thinking about when Barney had first started in on him. "It's, um...it's actually about Alyx..."

Gordon could feel himself turning red, and although his instincts drove his gaze down determinedly at the table, he managed to sneak a peek to discern Barney's reaction.

Which was to suddenly clear up from his face any sign of foolishness, replacing it instead with a keen, sober interest. Gordon had been a little nervous about how Barney would give him advice about this, since he'd basically helped raise Alyx—it wasn't like Barney could play the role of an objective outside party or strictly a best-buddy wingman, since he had some emotional stake in both Gordon and Alyx's perspectives. Actually, Gordon realized, Barney probably was more invested in Alyx's side of things, because he'd known her longer, thanks to the weird temporal distortion that had zapped Gordon out of existence for twenty of the twenty-one years they'd known each other.

"Oh?" Barney coaxed him on, both his eyebrows slightly aloft.

"I...I um..." It had been hard enough to articulate the idea to himself in his head, and now speaking it out loud to another person was even harder. "I...I'm gonna tell her..."

Gordon fumbled for words suddenly, his voice having already dropped to a low, soft mumble. He couldn't bring himself to say something like, "that I'm in love with her", it just sounded too dramatic somehow, even if that was what it was; "that I like her" sounded like a fourteen-year-old clumsily euphemizing some schoolyard crush because the previous wording was too powerful. "How I feel about her" sounded wishy-washy, and he was now starting to panic at the pause he was leaving in his speech; it was just the right opening for Barney to inject some corny crack about wanting to bang Alyx, or some other sexual euphemism that would quickly start stacking into a combo of unfair innuendos—

"You wanna tell her you like her?" Barney said softly and seriously. Gordon nodded, surprised to see not a trace of mockery in Barney's face.

"Hmm," Barney confirmed his understanding as he took another sip of coffee. Pausing a second to stare off into space, apparently thinking, he then broke the silence with a steady-toned, firm but quiet, "Good for you".

He said this pointedly looking Gordon in the eye, and Gordon marveled yet again that despite retaining his ability to instigate frivolity like he had done back in another world that had ceased to exist decades ago, his friend was, in fact, significantly older now, newly-forming creases on his face making him look heavy with experience, and with a sense of maturity gained over the years that Gordon was now glad Barney knew when to turn on and off. A minute ago he'd been acting like an adolescent and knocking Gordon off his too-serious high horse, but now he seemed intent on being the wiser big brother-figure Gordon needed at the moment. The younger man could only reflect to himself how grateful he was to have Barney as a friend.

"How ya gonna do it?" Barney was back to tracing coffee rings on the table.

"Well, that's the thing," Gordon let out his breath with some sense of weary frustration, "I...I figured the best way was, like...I want to give her a song to play. I know that's stupid," he hastily added, seeing Barney's eyebrow shoot up, "but I can't cook and I can't think of some big, grand gesture or—"

"You could just tell her," Barney interjected with a tone of obviousness.

"What, you mean like write her a letter or something?"

Barney sighed. "No, Casanova, _not_ like monologuing at her on a piece of paper and letting her read it when you're not around to handle the fallout, not a letter...just tell her!"

Gordon realized his face had to have betrayed how queasy that new thought had made him, because Barney went on, expounding, "Walk up to her, look her in the eye, make sure you didn't leave your brass ones in your little-boy racecar underpants, and tell her flat-out! It's scary as all get-out, Gordon, but how else do you live?"

"But...just...just walk up to her and just...?"

"Look, rejection is terrifying, _women_ are terrifying, that's how it all works! People are terrifying, and we wouldn't be worth the trouble of climbin' outta the trees and makin' a sharp stick if we didn't have the guts to deal with the scary things being a human means, and I don't mean mammoths and saber-toothed cats or post-industrialist capitalism or Combine armies. The scary stuff is the stuff we do every day, the parts about getting along with other people—you ask for a raise, you tell a friend they gotta stop doing that thing they do, _you tell a girl you like her_ —all that's the tough stuff about being a human being, and it doesn't mean a thing to take out some giant alien beast or haul yourself outta a hole in the ground full of Red Berets if you can't take the day-in-day-out risks of putting yourself out there with people!"

Gordon was floored. Barney seemed to mean this vehemently, and Gordon was almost wondering if he detected some kind of anger behind Barney's passionate exhortations.

Gordon could only squirm with discomfort at...well, what exactly? The obviousness of how he should go about it, as opposed to how he was? The universal shame of being unable to tell a crush how one felt about them? That Barney was calling him out on his cowardice in the things that really mattered?

Whether in reaction to Gordon's embarrassment or not, Barney softened a little.

"Look," he began...and then hesitated, as if he hadn't actually thought of what he wanted to say. In a second though, he came out with, "I know this is terrifying and all, I've been there, and it never stops being terrifying. But I really don't think Alyx would reject you, alright? I mean, come on, it's Alyx...how bad would she treat you on the tiny little off-chance she _wasn't_ interested?"

That...that was a horrifying, as-yet-not-fully-tested thought, and now that Barney had suggested it to him, Gordon's mind was all too happy to run amok with scenarios of Alyx trying to let him down easy...or not-so-easy. The awkwardness of the initial encounter, how his face would feel as it burned while she stammered how he was such a great friend BUT, how they'd avoid each other for God knows how long after, giving him plenty of time to wallow alone in his inadequacy; or else, he feared, as his mind conjured up a new terror for him he hadn't thought of before, one born of the part of him that always reverted back to a version of himself at thirteen years old when he tried to deal with women: an image of Alyx, looking at him with embarrassed pity, too-gently trying to let him know that it _wasn't_ that he was a huge loser, and it was nothing at all about how she was way out of his league, it was just, _you know..._

If Gordon was wearing some expression on his face that indicated that he was flashing back to the ghosts of the middle school dating trenches, that might explain why Barney let out a short puff of air, looking like he was about to try a different tack.

"Okay, fine, do this your way. You want to give her a song...as cheeseball as that is...so what do you need to make this happen? Besides a completely different strategy than the one you're going with."

Gordon gave Barney a sullen look, but was grateful Barney was willing to help, and so admitted, "I don't actually know how to get my hands on any music or what format to give it to her in. I was a god of mixtape cassettes back in the day, and I developed this home-brew improvement on my CD burner at one point—it was actually pretty cool, it kicked up the write speed by a factor of—"

Here Barney started making snoring sounds, helpfully informing Gordon that he was getting, as Barney called it, "nerd-tracked"—that is, distracted from what he was saying by expounding on something, usually his own nerdiness, that no one else cared about—so Gordon ground to a halt and waited for Barney to cut it out.

"So basically," the older man said, quickly 'waking up', "we still use digital files kinda like MP3s, just like...a gazillion times better...obviously, what with it being The Future and all...and you've seen the storage devices we use for everything. Those'll hold pretty much anything, and we use them for all different kinds of data, so you can go with that and Alyx'll be able to pop it into the reader for it and hear the song."

"So...how is this different from copying MP3 files to a flash drive?" Gordon wanted to know.

Barney paused for a moment, then summarized, his hands outspread on the table, "Aliens."

 _Ah, yes_ , Gordon understood. Extraterrestrial technology did make a lot of stuff they already did...different. Basically better, but not always in absolutely vital ways. Gordon just knew he had once, without thinking about it, referred to the data storage devices they all used as a 'flash drive', and the entire group of rebels he'd been with had looked at him as if he'd suggested bringing 'round the horse and buggy and then either burst out laughing or cooed about how cute his anachronism had been. He had made sure to never use the term _flash drive_ again.

The only remaining problem to be solved was the fact that Gordon had no music collection of his own, his amassed media formats being both obsolete and in different parts of the world, if they still physically existed. Here again, his best friend came to the rescue. Barney dragged Gordon up to his quarters where, after some digging and rummaging while Gordon curiously inspected the room and Barney's possessions, conjured up several cases of what looked like ammo clips.

Barney emptied a few of the clips of what turned out not to be bullets but little cylindrical... _not-flash-drives_. Barney assessed how much he had, then handed three of the five cases of clips to Gordon, who piled them into his arms and tried not to let his more physically-inclined friend see how heavy they felt to him, while Barney took the remaining two in his grasp easily and they made their way down to one of the basement levels, where Barney gave Gordon an impromptu lesson on how to use one of the multi-purpose media readers that were all over the base. Gordon had been thinking of these devices as sort of an all-in-one home entertainment system crossed with a high-level desktop PC, and had spent the past few months finding ways to let anyone else work the things besides himself whenever they were needed. Although needing a lesson on the new technology made Gordon feel less like a scientist formerly on the very cutting edge of technological developments and more like someone's grandma being taught how to send an e-mail, he devoured the opportunity Barney was presenting him with and, true to his old form (and much to his relief), learned quickly. Once he was able to figure out how to load, access, read, and navigate the files from the little cylinders on the reader, Barney announced he was heading upstairs and Gordon could "have at it". Gordon wasted no time and eagerly went to work scouring Barney's music collection.

Gordon began to sort through the files. Each digital file had the song itself, the official video, and the lyrics and liner notes, along with relevant album and single artwork. Barney had arranged them by his own bizarre categorization system; under a group headed "For Making the Combine Suffer", Barney had put a collection of songs by Rage Against the Machine and Queen and the song "Cotton-Eyed Joe" by the one-hit-wonder band Rednex, while under "My Sweetheart", he had put such diverse songs as "Romeo and Juliet" by Dire Straits; a sampling of Beatles songs ranging from "When I'm Sixty-Four" and "Here, There and Everywhere" to "Why Don't We Do It In The Road"; and "You Shook Me All Night Long" by AC/DC. This grouping, apart from not making a whole lot of sense to Gordon, seemed to be selections of a more personal nature to Barney, so Gordon figured he shouldn't intrude into that section—and besides, he didn't really want to know why Barney had both "I'm Gonna Be the Man (500 Miles)" and "When Doves Cry" in there.

Gordon instead tried a grouping of songs titled "Woman-bait", this seeming to be a likely location for finding what he needed, even if Barney's wording was a little...off. But the Savage Garden and Barry White that Barney had filed there seemed to be risking coming on too strong and seeming too obvious, among other problems like potentially making Alyx question his motivation. He finally found a song in the heading marked, strangely enough, "To bug Maggie", that he had known from when he was very young but hadn't ever really listened to for the meaning.

Now that he listened to it again, though, it seemed to fit perfectly; the chorus was just the declaration of his feelings he needed, and the verses, now that he actually paid attention to them, were spot-on for their relationship up to this point. Feeling excited at his good luck in having found just the perfect song, Gordon made a copy onto the blank cylinder Barney had left him with—Barney had said the Resistance designed them to be disguised in bullet casings to smuggle information—and started mentally rehearsing how he would present it to Alyx. He couldn't wait to give it to her and see her reaction—his stomach was tingling with excitement the way it had when he was a child lying in bed waiting for the first day of school or a new episode of Carl Sagan. He vowed not to rush into it, though, and to wait until an opportunity presented itself…rather than running to Alyx's dorm, banging down the door, and giving it to her right now, as he was tempted to do.

He carried the little flash drive-device in his pocket for the rest of the day, practicing in his head what he would say when he gave it to her. _"Hey, Alyx? This is for you. I wanted you to know I've been thinking a lot about..."_ —about what? He had to be careful with his wording here; not too strong, but not too vague, or it wouldn't seem heartfelt— _"...about where we could go from here"_ —that sounded good, a good balance between the two extremes— _"...and I just wanted you to have this. It sums up my feelings pretty well."_

Wait, should he say _feelings_ , or _thoughts_? _Feelings_ felt like he was baring too much of himself, and she might think it sounded flaky. _Thoughts_...did that sound too...scientific? He didn't want her to think his analytical mind wasn't capable of feeling strong emotion...emotion strong enough that for the first time in his life he was pretty sure he knew what "pining" meant...although he couldn't tell her that, either, that was a guaranteed way to scare her off. He should tell her something _like_ that, but less off-putting, let her know he meant it and wanted to do so much for her. But if he started talking that way, he was sure he'd either start rhapsodizing at her how he felt until he made Barney's Shakespeare performance look dull, or else he'd peter off and stammer and blush and...ugh. The latter was more likely, he knew, but still, he shouldn't risk the former. _Stick to something short, sweet and simple, Gordon_ , he told himself. _Don't let yourself get pulled into expounding on it...just short, sweet, and to-the-point._ That's why he was doing this anyway; let the song do the talking, that was a safer way to do it.

Unless she heard the song, got the message, understood what he meant completely, and still rejected him. Oh God. The tingling in his stomach threatened to turn violent and run away with the granola bar he'd eaten as an afternoon snack a few hours ago. _Don't think about that, just...focus on giving it to her. You can worry about what she'll say after that._

It was a Saturday, so they both had the day off, and Gordon was free to put his plan into action right away. But of course he didn't.

After picking out the song, he went up to his quarters, closed himself into the attached bathroom, and practiced different ways he could present this to Alyx. After roughly five minutes, though, he was feeling quite stupid, monologuing at his reflection like some kind of cliche, so he instead wandered downstairs, out of the base, and onto the grounds, where maybe he'd find Alyx. Except that this wasn't likely, as Alyx rarely took strolls around the grounds at random points in the middle of the day. After pretending to himself that what he was really doing was using the peaceful, natural embrace of nature to ground himself, he went back inside, trying first the common rooms on each floor, then the mess hall, then the labs, with no sign of Alyx. Here he decided he had stretched his legs enough and that he'd run into Alyx eventually—it was rare for him to go this long in a day without seeing her already (although that probably had something to do with his trekking all over it instead of gravitating toward any of their usual hangout spots)—and tromped off purposelessly back to the mess hall for dinner.

Finally, after sweating for the majority of the day, Gordon saw Alyx after dinner, walking back from back to her room from the garage where she often tinkered or pitched in to help the mechanics repair or build various parts of machinery. He could tell this because she was in one of his favorite states to find her in: slightly sweaty and flushed, her hair tied back in a bandana, her arms streaked with grease and smelling distinctly of motor oil. Was it weird that he loved finding her this way? Was it her easy confidence in both her capability with the machinery and her appearance, despite smelling like diesel, that got him going? Was it the sweat or the flush or how happy she always looked with herself that got his heart thumping in his chest? The tiny cuts on her hands he wanted to fuss over unnecessarily for her or maybe the desire to help her clean up that made his pulse run? He just knew he always felt like a dopey little boy who had never seen a grown woman before when he saw her like this. Maybe it was fitting for him to give her the song this way.

"There you are!" she greeted him with her customary enthusiasm as she was rounding the dormitory hallway corner wrenches and wiping her hands on a rag. "I haven't seen you all day! You been avoiding me, Gordon?" she winked to show she was kidding, and Gordon felt his stomach drop, not from feelings of crushiness, but from nerves and a little bit of guilt. Maybe he'd felt that by not seeking Alyx out and letting her approach him whenever she would, he could prolong their non-awkward friendship in the case that things went...south.

His stomach flipped again, and his nerves had to have shown on his face, because Alyx's eyebrows popped upwards and she asked, "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," he said a little too quickly, "I just um..."

She continued to look concerned, and he realized there was no point in trying to play this off in order to try not to seem awkward. He squared his stance on the floor, tried to straighten his back a little, and forcing himself to look Alyx directly in the face, said, "I wanted to give you something. Um...here." He held out his hand with the little data storage thing and she didn't leave him hanging, accepting it without any hesitation, although with a little surprise.

"What's on it?" she wanted to know.

"Umm...a song," he said, now no longer able to look her in the face anymore. "I um...it's for you, and..." he didn't want to stick his neck out too much in his preamble. Let the song do the talking. "...and I just want you to know I mean it. All of it." He was staring at the tiled linoleum of the dormitory floor and could feel his face hot with blood rising in it.

"Okay...can...can I listen to it now?" Alyx asked, an excited smile trying to creep across her face and Alyx herself trying to suppress it.

"Y-yeah, I...yeah," Gordon articulated eloquently. "I just uh...I'll be in my room if um...yeah."

Alyx disappeared into her room then, smiling at him around the door before closing it. And of course he didn't actually go down to his own room, he stood outside the door of hers for a few seconds, paralyzed by the temptation to listen in. He vowed to stay only a few seconds, though, and as he heard the song starting up, he fidgeted, trying to hold out longer, then turned to beat a hasty and surreptitious retreat to his room.

And maybe if he hadn't done that, lingered those extra few seconds, what happened next might not have happened.

The song had been going for less than a full thirty seconds before the door opened again, rather abruptly. Alyx stuck her head out, saw him, and headed full steam toward him. Gordon braced himself for one of the attack-hugs she was known for...

...and that was when she punched him in the stomach. Stars broke out in his vision, and when they dissipated, he was looking at the floor, doubled over, between watery eyes, gasping for breath.

Surely there had been some kind of mistake, Alyx had accidentally hit him in some way while trying to hug him...but as he look up at her, she was glaring down at him, her eyes leaking watery hurt and burning fury.

"You are a _jerk_!" she spat at him, enunciating each word, her face crumpled up with emotion. She looked like she wanted to hit him again, but instead of raising her arm again, turned on her heel and stormed into her room, banging the door shut with a loud sound that was _almost_ timed well enough to block out the sob that burst out of her, as if refusing to be held back.

That was how Gordon ended up curled up on his bed and hating himself for the next hour.

At the moment, what was torturing Gordon was not only the feeling of rejection, or of Alyx actually being mad at him, but the knowledge that he should have listened to Barney, and that this probably had happened because he wouldn't take an emotional risk. He had done something wrong with the song, which wouldn't matter if the song weren't a factor at all, if he had just told her, to her face, in his own words—stumbling, painfully awkward, honest and vulnerable and not at all playing it safe, but making things more certain by taking the risk. He had messed this up with an improbable degree of finesse, a rotten kind of anti-skill that he was sure was getting to be his trademark and he was pretty certain he had just lost all chance of Alyx ever being anything more than a friend to him—if she would even be that, now. In one fell swoop, he had broken more than he had imagined even in his deepest insecurities, and since he didn't know exactly what he'd done wrong, he wasn't able to even determine if there was a way to fix it.

Wait...maybe...if there was some way...could he find out what he had done wrong? He could get Barney to ask Alyx what his misstep had been, and Barney could report it back to Gordon, who...

...was, again, acting like he was in middle school. He pictured the berating Barney would give him (or that he imagined Barney would give him) if Gordon told him he wanted Barney to act as an emissary to Alyx in pursuit of diplomatic relations. He could imagine, clearly, and in detail, the look Barney would probably give him before reminding Gordon, in no short terms, that they actually were all adults and maybe if he hadn't acted like a clumsy teenager to begin with, he wouldn't be in this mess.

Gordon was just reflecting on whether it was a paradox or made sense to try to fix the damage caused by one pre-pubescent tactic with another, when a knock rang out clear and firm on Gordon's door. He felt the blood draining from his face as he worried it might be Alyx, but the knock had been the solid, assertive, brisk knock he knew to be Barney's style, and it was indeed quickly followed up with Barney's voice, projected in a no-nonsense tone.

"Gordon, I know you're in there and I'm not going away until you—"

But Gordon was already opening the door, hurriedly fumbling for the light switch as he realized that the sun had lowered somewhat in the sky while he had been curled up in his oblivious ball of self-loathing.

"Wow, that bad? You look—" Barney began, evidently seeing something on Gordon's face that was cause for concern, but Gordon was, without any introduction or attempts at a preamble, steering him into the wooden chair he used for guests (or would have, if he had guests in his room).

Once he had Barney seated, bewildered and looking like this was not alleviating his concern at all but only deepening it, Gordon parked himself on the edge of the bed across from the chair, facing Barney, and addressed him with immediate directness: "What did I do wrong?"

Barney's mouth was hanging open the slightest amount, and the poor man blinked a few times as if thrown way off balance by his friend's behavior. Then, averting his eyes as if trying not to stare at something indecent, he cleared his throat.

"All I know is that Alyx is locked in her room, cryin' up a storm, and not letting me get anything out of her other than 'ask that idiot with the clever sense of humor'."

Now it was Gordon's turn to be alarmed. His mind had almost hit a speed bump at the revelation that Alyx was crying, and because of him, and spent a few seconds playing it over and over on a loop like a stuck vinyl record before letting him catch the rest of what Barney was saying, the part about Gordon being an idiot and apparently playing a joke on her. Gordon's reaction to Barney's concluding statement was all he could think of doing: curling up back into a ball and melting sideways onto the bed like a sludgy pile of idiot who made Alyx cry and whom she was definitely mad at.

"It wasn't a joke why did she think it was a joke she barely listened to the first half-minute of it before she came out and hit me Barney I picked the _wrong song_!" Gordon wailed in one long, half-coherent, jumbled string of free-association agony.

Barney seemed further bewildered by Gordon's reaction, and it occurred to Gordon, in a fresh self-inflicted barb with which to despise himself, that Barney had never seen Gordon like this before...ever, actually. Not even while drunk. The niggling little imp that was gleefully twisting the barb in Gordon's mind reminded him that Barney thought he was overly-serious and mature beyond his age, and boy, was Barney never going to make _that_ mistake ever again.

"Well what song did you pick?" Barney demanded.

Gordon wordlessly fished into his pocket and withdrew the cylindrical data carrier. It now seemed, in a melodramatic way, painfully appropriate that the things were designed to be disguised as bullets. Barney took the not-flash-drive and looked around the room, his eyes finally coming to rest on a machine Gordon had piled various odds and ends on top of. Now that Gordon saw it again, he realized they had given him one of the media reader things and, not knowing how to use it, he had treated it as irrelevant furniture in his room and forgotten it was there. Barney had already gotten up and was clearing various papers, a sweater, and some other miscellaneous items off the space, Gordon watching apathetically when he normally would have leapt to clean it up himself first or at least defended himself from anticipated accusations against his neatness—something that, even if he wasn't always perfect at, he liked people thinking he was. Today it was just well-suited to what a _disappointing_ and _poorly-managed_ person he was in general.

Barney fired the thing up, which was a lot simpler and quicker than booting up a PC, as the reader apparently had compartmentalized functions and would only power up what it needed to in order to read a piece of media—and popped the little fake bullet device into a slot. After a second or two, the song began to play. If Gordon hadn't known he'd done something wrong based off of Alyx's reaction to the opening of the track, he would have immediately realized he'd gone drastically awry when Barney, beating Alyx's quick reaction to the song's first thirty seconds or so, barely withheld himself from slamming the meat of his palm against his forehead for a full _two_ seconds into the track's playtime. In what Gordon was pretty sure was in fact a spontaneous, uncontrived gesture, Barney actually facepalmed before three full notes had been played. Gordon was frozen in horror. Was the song _that_ bad a choice, with some significance he didn't know of, that people recognized it that quickly? The sinking feeling in Gordon's stomach confirmed that this seemed to be a rare time when Barney's immediate, incidentally-comical reaction might not be for some kind of effect.

"What, what's wrong?!" he yelped, the panic in his mind causing him to accidentally speak in a voice noticeably higher than his normal speaking timbre. Barney, not taking his left hand away from his forehead, turned the song off with his right, then let it drop to his side. Then, sliding his hand down his face to massage the bridge of his nose, he pursed his lips as if thinking how to frame something or deliver unwanted news. Finally, letting that hand drop to his side as well, still not having met Gordon's gaze, he tilted his head back somewhat, looking at the wall above the media reader a little ways higher than his eye-level, carefully chose his words and then carefully, _carefully_ delivered them.

"Gordon...you were away for twenty years, and...you missed a lot."

He moved to the chair in front of Gordon and sat down, with Gordon just about ready to shred the bedsheets to rags with anticipative anxiety.

Gordon had known that after he'd disappeared into biostasis following the Black Mesa Incident and everything that had gone down on Xen, there had been a period of roughly three years or so during the first decade of the twenty-first century where the Earth was struggling to adjust to the effects of the Resonance Cascade—portal storms, extraterrestrial fauna, the shock of finding they did have neighbors in this galactic borough after all in the Vortigaunts—but the Combine had not yet invaded. This period of time had, despite the rampant instability and disorientation the entire population of the planet was feeling, nevertheless still had some culture to it—which, after the Seven Hours War, was a bygone memory in the history of humanity. Gordon knew there had been non-alien-derived technological advancements just as there had always been, and that the Internet, which had had only a fledgling culture of it's own to the eyes of the general public a few years prior, quickly blossomed upon seeing heavy use by mainstream users. This he already knew, and it provided useful background context as Barney went on to explain the concept of a RickRoll.

Gordon had heard of the concept of Internet memes before, and was pretty sure he understood the idea—he knew about sociological concepts of memetics and so forth when he was still a fledgling researcher, so the idea made a certain kind of sense, even if the logic of the memes themselves were often beyond Gordon's immediate grasp. This was likewise the case as Barney attempted to convey why unexpectedly playing a song, and always the same particular one, regardless of the situational context, could be funny...and, for the victim of the surprise, somehow debasing. What Gordon derived from the explanation was that the song he had picked out for Alyx to listen to from him, the song he had used to try to convey to her his longing, acknowledgment of their mutual attraction, and hopeful promise of a committed relationship, had, prior to this interim period in human history, been seen as merely a pop song from the 1980s that had possibly gotten more radio play over the years than was merited, and which now was impossible to disentangle from an immediately-recognizable, well-known, widespread, and very popular prank.

This just wasn't fair. It simply wasn't. How, of all the songs Gordon had had access to in Barney's digital collection, could he have just so happened to pick the one song that, instead of coming across as a tender and earnest proclamation of love as he had intended, turned out to be some stupid society-wide joke? How could he expect Alyx to know he had had no clue of the phenomenon of RickRolling, and wasn't trying to, as he now understood, mock her or treat something they had been working towards for months flippantly?

Gordon was now lying on his bed glaring accusingly at the ceiling, as if it had had some part in his woes.

"Is there, like...some kind of... _anti_ -RickRoll song I can use to tell Alyx I didn't mean to RickRoll her? Can I un-RickRoll somebody? There's got to be some kind of—what?"

He'd had to stop and demand an explanation for the look Barney was now giving him, a look of patronizing incredulity.

"Really?" Barney asked him.

"I...no," Gordon admitted, but Barney evidently felt that a lesson that could not afford to be missed was being learned and decided to drive it home.

"YOU...ARE AN IDIOT, GORDON." Barney didn't shout this, just raised his voice slightly and enunciated very clearly to emphasize how little of Gordon's supposedly ample intelligence had been displayed in today's course of events.

"Yeah, I actually heard that earlier too—"

"You are stupid because you took something that should have been easy—okay, not easy, no, it was always going to be hard, but you took something hard and somehow made it a million times harder! You managed to somehow mess this up when it was being _thrown_ at you because you couldn't get up the goddamn _rocks_ to tell another _adult human being_ that you have _feelings_ with your _big-boy_ words and now you're both lying in your bedrooms in the dark cryin' like a pair of pathetic _teenagers_!"

This was all a fair assessment and Gordon knew he deserved it, so he just listened glumly while Barney's momentum plateaued, knowing that it would have to peter off after that.

"Now Alyx is upset— _Alyx_ , who I have watched mope around about boys before but who I have never seen be _this_ upset about a guy and if she hits you again you deserve it— _you're_ upset, and you're thinkin' up all new ways to be stupid to try to get yourself out of the stupid-hole you got yourself into with the first stupid, and you know what? You two _need_ each other, because you're absolute wrecks without each other, and hey, you both like crying in the dark about your damn little feelings you won't talk about like adults, so you got that in common!"

Barney stopped here to catch his breath and glare at Gordon with a fury that could only come from a best friend saying 'I told you so'. Gordon merely murmured back, "I know."

At this, Barney seemed to soften a little. The older man sighed and said, "Look, Gordon..."

"No, no, I know, I know what I've got to do," Gordon headed him off. Barney looked surprised, and Gordon didn't know whether to be offended or if, again, he deserved it. "It just...sucks. You're right, it's hard and it's scary and...and now it's gonna be harder and scarier than it would have been before because yeah, I got myself into a...a stupid-hole with Alyx." Here he paused to interrupt himself with a pained whining sound, before launching into another jumble of unfiltered insecurities. "I hurt her, Barney! I hurt her feelings and she's mad at me, and she probably hates me and I probably just ruined any shot I ever had with her and my ribs still hurt but what if she hits me again? I mean, I deserve that too, probably, in fact I should probably just let her beat the crap out of me before I try to—"

"Actually, she feels really bad about that," Barney interjected. "When I went up to her room to try to get her to talk to me, she was throwin' every insult in the book at you and then moaning about how she shouldn't have hit you. Kept switching back and forth like that. You two really do have a lot in common."

"Really?" Gordon said the word with rather undue enthusiasm; it made him feel a lot better to know that Alyx regretted hitting him. At least, it did for the moment. Maybe she didn't completely hate him yet—maybe there was some hope of him being able to talk his way back into her good graces!

Before he could get carried away with himself, however, he presented himself with the problem of how he was going to do that.

"Barney, what should I—"

"I am not giving you lines or a script, Gordon, this has gotta be you, all you!"

"I'm not asking for _lines_ "—jeez, he wasn't that helpless—"but what do women want to hear when a guy tells them they like them?"

Barney shrugged a huge shrug in response, his face contorted into a baffled expression that wordlessly conveyed his reply: _Women are baffling even to me, your guess is as good as mine._ Gordon's mind started wandering toward scenes he remembered from movies of this kind of thing; Jerry Maguire made it to the fore of his imagination first, Tom Cruise telling Renee Zellweger that schlocky line about 'you complete me'...but he quickly caught himself, realizing that was the kind of thinking that had gotten him into this mess.

"You gotta make this one hundred percent Gordon here, or else what's the point? That's all I can tell ya, because like I say, this is the hard stuff."

Gordon chewed on this for a moment, trying to think up what words he wanted to use.

"How about..." And that was where he lost his nerve again. God, this would be terrible. "Okay, what if I say something like..." He hesitated. "'Alyx'," he began, because at least that was getting one word he'd need out there. Now he struggled to add on to it. "Um..."

Barney seemed to sense the trouble he was having. "Don't figure out certain words to use. You try to memorize a script like an actor, you're gonna get in front of her and get stage fright and forget your lines. Then you freak out that you had this script to go by and you can't remember it and you freeze and it all just spirals from there."

Gordon glanced at Barney. How did Barney know this? Was his friend _not_ a god of what women wanted after all? Was he, in fact, human, someone who had at some point or other experienced rejection or struggled with vulnerability around women? Gordon said nothing but filed this away in a revised mental schema of Barney Calhoun in his mind. He kept forgetting only one of them was still a young man with less life experience under his belt. He'd always gone to Barney with his stories of striking out or planning a move on somebody cute at a bar only to have the woman not even notice he was trying to get her attention. Barney would then dole out advice that probably was not actually tested but that Gordon believed came from experience—such behavior and belief was key to young male bonding rituals. It occurred to Gordon that maybe Barney actually knew what he was talking about now, and that somehow that was connected to his admission that he _didn't_ know what he was talking about. Whatever that meant, Gordon felt somehow a lot more confident in taking advice from forty-something Barney, as if he were in good hands.

"Try this," Barney went on, "whenever I know beforehand I've gotta say something to somebody—'Alright, troops, let's go storm the whatever, yadda yadda yadda', 'No, General, I can't do this with the supplies you've given me, here's what I need from Command', 'No, Jimmy, everyone knows you're gay and no one cares, it doesn't even matter anymore, et cetera', 'Hey, Doctor Kleiner, this is why you need to stop using live vertebrates to test your teleporter on', so on and so forth—I come up with a list of, like, bullet points in my head. That's all I need. I know I'm going to talk about This Thing and This Thing and This Thing, and maybe I have a general idea about how I wanna talk about each of those things, maybe I want to use this certain phrase here or whatever, but all I need to know is kinda like a general outline of what I wanna say. Then, while I'm talking, I remember my bullet points and say them however comes naturally. That could really work for you here. You just gotta be ready to adjust if she says something back that you don't expect. And all that takes is keeping yourself grounded and not letting yourself get into a tailspin."

Gordon was having an "aha moment" as Barney said all this: yes, it could work! He could totally do that! That was basically like a lecture plan from the days of his fellowship at Innsbruck in structure: a skeleton of what he wanted to say that he fleshed out as he was saying it, which allowed for some room for adaptation as he went. It was brilliant. Why had he never realized he could use this strategy in real life, and not just teaching? Gordon half-bitterly reflected that this knowledge could have made his life up until this point so much more manageable.

At this point, Barney left Gordon to himself to figure out his bullet points, heading downstairs for "a stiff drink, because damn, but you two little nerds take it outta me. I am so glad I'm outta my twenties, that crap was no fun". After expressing this gratitude for his longevity and the resulting reduction in emotional turmoil, Barney left Gordon alone and Gordon set to work mentally preparing himself for the Herculean task now ahead of him.

He spent an indeterminate amount of time figuring out what he wanted to say, being both impatient to clear things up with Alyx and afraid of her reaction when he brought himself to her. Finally, throwing the idea to the wind that reiterating his points over and over in his head would make him less likely to freeze up, Gordon declared his impatience the winner of the struggle and got up from the bed. He turned on the light—it was now significantly darker in his room than when he had first fled Alyx's wrath this afternoon—and straightened himself up as best he could before leaving his room, making sure his shirt wasn't rumpled, he didn't have a case of bedhead, or God forbid, that there was something on his face.

Satisfied that he no longer looked like he had been struggling to breathe earlier after being punched in the stomach, or like he might be some flaky nerd who curled up on his bed hating himself when a woman rejected him, he squared his shoulders, took one last look in the mirror...straightened his back again, told himself that he could handle this and to now just get out there already...and turned on his heel, marched out the door of his quarters, and down the hallway that led to the staircase between dormitory levels.

He took the stairs with deliberately slow pacing, not wanting to get himself out of breath when he knew he'd be nervously trying to breathe regularly in a moment, then entered the hallway to Alyx's level.

There was her door. It was closed, but a dim light was shining through the little window in the door—she probably had a desk lamp on or something. He steeled himself and approached the door, reminding himself that he didn't have to walk with any degree of stealth, _so quit moving like you're about to ambush a squad of soldiers, Freeman, you weirdo_.

As he neared her doorway, he could hear mumbling in Alyx's voice coming from the room. It kept moving back and forth, like she was pacing, perhaps, and she appeared to be talking vehemently to herself under her breath. He hesitated, trying to catch any words that might bleed their way through the door, but he couldn't make out distinct verbiage, only Alyx's tone and inflections; it sounded like she was giving herself some kind of pep talk. Gordon didn't let himself stand there like some creepy guy lurking outside her bedroom trying to overhear her thoughts dictated to herself, though—he knew by now that that way lay disaster—and, raising his fist to the door, lightly—but assertively, he hoped—knocked.

The muttering stopped instantly, as did the location of it—she had stopped pacing. He didn't let himself dally waiting for a reaction, and, taking the initiative for himself, swallowed, and then, with as much steadiness as he could muster, called out, "Alyx?"

There was a hesitation then, and he was about to call out again when he heard her, a little ways inside the door, say, "What?"

It wasn't shouted or particularly accusing, but having a salutation answered with 'what' is never a neutral response. He responded, as clear-voiced as he could manage, "Can I please talk to you?"

Maybe it was something in his voice, or what he said, or something else, but Alyx swung the door open rather quickly, with a good deal of force, after a slight moment's hesitation. Gordon almost jumped back, so nervous was he, and then there she was, her face not tear-streaked and her eyes not red, although they were a little bleary. Her expression, however, was what let him know he better start talking. Somehow it was made more expressive by the moderation of what she was conveying; it wasn't devastation or fury, but it was hurt, and Alyx apparently got angry when she was hurt. That was the nearest description for it: anger. Not some burning spite, but a mid-level glare that said she'd been wronged and he better start explaining himself.

His bullet points went right out the window and he blurted out, "I didn't know about RickRolling until just now!"

This was a stupid thing to say, and not what either of them had expected to come out of Gordon's mouth, so Alyx responded appropriately, "Huh?"

"When I picked out that song..." Now he was starting to think again, though, his initial panic being replaced by remembering what he had wanted to say and how to get there from here and...oh dammit...

He tried to put himself on automatic again, because auto-Gordon was better at getting out the words he needed—or at least any words at all.

"I picked out that song for you because...look, I didn't know about RickRolling because I was away for twenty years and I just thought it was the right song that said what I wanted to say, and..."

He stopped, feeling like he'd just stuck his neck out too far...but that was the point, wasn't it? To take an emotional risk. Alyx's eyebrows were raised, and she asked, "And that was...?"

 _No going back now, Freeman. If you can take down a Nihilanth with a crowbar, you better be able to say you can do this._

"I like you," he said, although he couldn't bring himself to look her in the eye and instead fixed his gaze at a point on her shoulder. He could feel the burning in his face. "I...I was trying to say I really, really like you, Alyx, and..."

...and what?

"...and I want to be more than just friends." That sounded lame and stupid, but he'd gotten the words out. Now he tried to make up for the lameness of them by adding on more, better-sounding words. "I...I thought doing it with a song would be like, romantic or something, but I'm really just a wuss and was scared to say it to you like..."

"...like you are now?" Alyx's voice was soft and somewhat husky when she said it, and now that he brought himself to look at her face again, it had a very different set of emotions on it...none of them moderate. Her eye-bleariness had gotten significantly worse, but she was no longer looking at him with a hostile expression; she seemed sort of floored, somehow, like she was seeing something beautiful she hadn't expected.

He searched for words again and found himself saying, "I know it's stupid and I know it doesn't make sense that I can...you know...storm a Citadel or whatever but then have to act like a stupid kid trying to tell someone I like them, I just..."

Now he was stuck again. Should he say he was sorry? He should say he was sorry, that was definitely called for and he hadn't said that yet.

"I'm sorry, Alyx, I should have just been honest and—"

"I'm so sorry I punched you, Gordon!" Alyx threw herself at him in a hug, the miserable wail of an apology tearing out of her as she did so. Ironically, Gordon had thought, on a self-preserving reflex, as she had hurled herself at him, that the sudden movement was her about to hit him again, and was pleasantly surprised to find that she was not, in fact, inflicting further damage to his ribcage, and was actually doing one better by hugging him and apologizing.

He gingerly, ever-so-carefully (what, he realized, in case she decided to change her mind? Okay, then, he'd do it more eagerly) put his arms around her, and as she cried her tearful regret into his chest, she gently adjusted her arms so she was now carefully, timidly holding onto him.

This was _so_ much better than being punched.

"I'm sorry, Gordon, I shouldn't have hit you, I was so mad and I thought...I thought..."Alyx sounded like he had an hour or so ago, wailing his heart out to Barney. He wished she wouldn't feel so bad, and a protective instinct made him lean his face in near the side of her head.

"It's okay, it's okay," he found himself murmuring in a soothing voice. "You're...you're okay with this...now?" She unearthed her head from his chest, looking up at him with eyes shining with tears, and he wanted so much to make anything and everything better for her _right now_.

"Am I okay with...?"

His eyes darted around the doorway, and he nervously moistened his lips as he prepared to speak again.

She got it, though...she was always so good at understanding him when he was struggling for words. She shyly reached up and rested her hand on his cheek, a small smile starting to push past her misery at feeling guilty. Suddenly it was very hard for Gordon to think of anything: talking, forming thoughts, breathing, any part of him that didn't exist in the few square inches of his face covered by her hand.

"If..." Alyx started, her eyes then ducking away from him, then coming back, "I mean..." she broke off again. Then, returning her gaze to look him in the eye, she said, "Yes. Yes, definitely. Please."

He took this last word as an eager affirmation that yes, she had wanted this too, and wanted him to want her. He figured this was probably his cue that this was an opportune time to kiss her. And so he did.

The nearness of their bodies and the touch of lips on lips were enough to make Gordon heady with the thrill of finally kissing Alyx. They were pressed together like this, their arms comfortably embracing each other, and Gordon just wanted to keep going and see where this would lead, but apparently Alyx had to breathe, since when she broke off the kiss, she was flushed and breathless...but ecstatic. She quickly recovered and went in for another, this time with her hand moving through his hair. Gordon had none of his usual sense of the fact that they were making out in the doorway, where anybody in the hall could see them, because this was _fun_. Was it okay to start letting his hands do a little roaming, a little search and recon, at this point?

But then Alyx broke off again, and this time he was the one who was flushed and breathless, and he couldn't think of anything to say so he just smiled goofily instead. Alyx laughed a little under her breath and, leaning her head against his, whispered, "I love you, Gordon."

His heart thudded in his chest and he felt like he could leap off a skyscraper and fly, and out of his mouth came...

"I wanted to be the first to say it!"

Alyx looked surprised, then laughed again, a beautiful, almost musical sound to Gordon's ears. Then her eyes twinkled at him, amber lighting up with that teasing smile she always used for him.

"Then say it now!" she whispered with excitement, and then waited with bated breath.

"Alyx," he said, meeting her eyes, his voice low, "I love you. And...I'm crazy about you. And...I adore you and think you are the bomb..."

"'The bomb?' Oh my God, you're cute."

"And...I want to make you happy...and I want to be around you all the time, always...and I want to give you things and take care of you and make you laugh...and I don't ever, ever want to give you up...and I...I mean...um..."

Oh crap, how had he managed to mess this up?! The words had just popped into his head, the song completely forgotten, and now Alyx was going to be furious again...

...Instead, she just laughed as he tried to stammer an explanation that sounded like what he had just thought; this time her laughter was full-volume, a gleeful, hearty, almost-cackle of mirth.

"So..." she gasped, coming up for air, "explain for me...what parts about this song did you want me to hear? I mean, it's a cute song, I guess I just never really listened to the lyrics, you know?"

"Um, well..." He thought of playing the song for her again, but that would mean no longer being wrapped up together like this, and this was really nice...

Alyx broke away first, though, and darted into her room, switching on the light properly and leading him by the hand to the media player, where she put the not-flash-drive in again and started playing it. He stood there, feeling like a goof through the intro, until Rick Astley's voice, always way deeper than it should be, started in. Why oh why had he picked this song? Listening to it now, he wondered how it could ever have seemed like a good idea.

"We're no strangers to luuurve...you know the rules, and so do Iiii...a full commitment's what I'm, thinking ooooof..."

"Aww, you want to offer me a full commitment, Gordon?!" Alyx chirped brightly, seated on the bed.

"Well, yes, except I figured you COULD get the same offer from other guys, so I'd have to move fast."

"Awww!"

 _Hey, Freeman, you just scored some cool points_ , he congratulated himself.

"And then...then there's that whole chorus, right there," he followed up lamely as the song rolled into it. And because he didn't know what else to do while standing there listening to the song, he started bobbing a little on the spot to the music, in the way one does unconsciously just because music happens to be around.

"Oh my God, you are adorable," Alyx said, and he realized she was talking about his dancing.

 _Adorable? Alyx likes this? Keep going!_ He started bobbing just his head and then added his shoulders to the mix, his elbows then popping out to join the impromptu dance party in what was looking more and more like a nerdy white guy who didn't know how to dance. Alyx was giggling hysterically now, as he added some kind of foot-sticking-out thing that might have been borrowed from that paragon of high culture dance, the Hokey-Pokey. Then Gordon turned to face Alyx, who was doubled over in a sitting position on the edge of the bed with laughter and, holding her gaze in what he hoped at least _looked like_ a seductive stare, started to boogie on over in her direction.

She rose to meet him when he reached the bed, wrapping him up in her arms once again, her laughter slowly subsiding as she smiled at him adoringly.

He kissed her lightly on the lips then, a teasing touch that invited her to chase after more...and she did, going in for a full-mouthed embrace that gave him goosebumps. He was very happy to enjoy this for a few minutes, but before things got anymore interesting, he broke away briefly to ask, "So, is this gonna be like...our song now?"

He asked it with a facetious smile, but Alyx responded, firmly but with an eyebrow raised, "No."

"N...no?" he responded, a little thrown. She gave him a faux-serious but still slightly flirty look, pursing her lips as she shook her head slowly, all the while keeping her gaze on his lips.

"It's a very nice song, Gordon, and I love that you picked it out for me for the sentiment, but...it's still the RickRoll."

"Ah, I gotcha," he said, and he did; the song could have it's association with the Internet trolling prank waived temporarily, but when it all boiled down to it, it was forever, irredeemably stained.

"Should we pick out another?" Gordon asked Alyx in between short, lighter kisses.

"We have plenty of time for that," she smiled into his ear as he stared to work his way toward her neck.

And as Alyx held him tighter and the goosebumps began to break out across her skin from his touch, Rick Astley drawing his crooning to a close in the background, Gordon couldn't help but think that it wasn't always so bad to be RickRolled.


End file.
